FLL Kickoff

 Three Wake Robotics FLL teams got together for the FLL season kickoff!! All summer long, we studied about Natural Disasters to get ready for Natures Fury. Everybody was excited that kickoff and the beginning of the season were finally here!!!

At the kickoff, everyone ate lunch together and did fun team building activities outside! Then, it was finally time to watch the videos.  One video explained the missions for the robot and the other explained the project challenge for the season. We were glad to finally find out what Nature's Fury means. After the videos we broke into groups and started working on building the LEGO mission models for the robot table. I think that this table is going to be the funnest one yet! Our YAM (young adult mentor) agrees and he's been doing FLL for a long time.

Here is a link to the YouTube video that explains the robot game for this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5xj0FUSPY&feature=youtu.be

and this link will tell you all about the upcoming season!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrfKwW71xYs

Color Maze NXT 2.0

Here's an updated version of my Color Maze NXT. I drew the maze and used color foam to give people the chance to move them around and tell the robot how to get through the maze.

I'm a member of a group called Wake Robotics that does a lot of outreaches to get people interested in engineering and science. I'm hoping to show this robot at an outreach and give people a chance to "program" the robot by placing the colors on the maze and telling the robot where to go.

Happy Mothers Day Mom!:)

I got this hilarious card for my Mom on Mothers day! It says this:
    
        
What a mom says:
"clean up your room please". 

What a kid hears:
"I want you to mope around all day,
move a few things around, 
and complain about how hard you have to work". 


I saw a lot of other cards, but not quite right.
When I saw this card, that all changed! I knew this one was perfect the moment I read it!:)    

The Geography Fair

The Geography Fair is a time when home schoolers gather information about different countries and put it up on a tri-fold board and bring it to a big room where other people can look at them. I did my project on Iceland. I learned a lot! I think that one cool thing about Iceland is that it is on two tectonic plates that are pulling apart. Every time the plates pull apart magma fills the gap, which results in Iceland growing at a rate of about one inch per year!

I really enjoyed walking around and seeing everyone's projects. These are some of my favorite displays:

There was also a fun activity where the older kids got a list of questions about the countries. If you wanted to win a prize, you needed to find the answers on the displays. The younger kids got a passport. They went around to the displays and got stamps to win a prize. I helped my little brother get his passport stamped. We both got really cool inflatable globes!

Fun at Fine Arts Festival!!!

Last night I went to a home school Fine Arts Festival. This is a time when kids (and professional artists!) show their art to other home schoolers. Fine Arts Festival was in a big gym, so there was a lot of art enjoy! There where all kinds of art. Music, sculptures, sketches, paintings, and lots more.

I brought a sculpture that I made in my art class with Mrs. Brunner. Her class is really fun! (the link is for her website)  I constructed the sculpture out of newspaper, tape, and strips of plaster. It's a self sculpture that looks like me pitching a baseball. It was really hard to get the leg up off of the ground, and I had to put in a Popsicle stick splint to keep it up!  It was exciting to have my sculpture on display, but I was also a little bit nervous!

My little brother also participated. Here is a picture of his art.

One of the professional artists was really good at sketching. He was drawing people that came up to the table. He drew very quickly and was able to capture a face in just a few quick marks. Here is one of the sketches he made of me. I really like how he can easily put cool armor on and make it look real!

I'm really hoping that I can take one of his classes!  He has two blogs. One is CartoonSketching and the other is RobotNinjaMonsters.

I am going to participate next year!!!


                           

Please HELP Team PyroTech!!!!!

I have learned a lot from my mentors from Team PyroTech.  They are heading to the World Competition. You can read more about that in one of my previous posts. They have set up a fundraising campaign to help with the expenses. Please help them go to World. You can click on the link to see their fundraising page.

this is a picture of the fundraising 

page the link will take you to:

Every little bit helps!

You aren't only supporting the team... you are supporting all of the people they help too, like ME! :)

Color Maze NXT

This was a difficult program to write, but very fun! I had been playing around with the idea of a music sequencer that I found at Damien Kee's website. (Go check out the video, then come back!) I didn't want to take my robot apart to build his sequencer (yet!) because I'm using it to practice programming. So I made the sequencer so that it would drive over the colors instead of rotating over them.  It didn't work as well as I hoped, so I was thinking about other things to do with the color sensing program.

I decided to make a course for it to use colors to find it's way from start to finish.  I wanted it to use blue to turn right and red to turn left.  I had trouble getting it to turn accurately though. My batteries were low and that made still more problems. I made turns more accurate by stopping before the turns and turning more slowly.  That helped a lot! -and now it's working great!!!

I am hoping to take the robot to our next outreach and let people draw red and blue squares to help the robot through a course. I think this will give people a basic idea of what it's like to write a program.

Here is video of my robot doing the color course: